Ignition by Inductive Automation is the SCADA and HMI platform behind many factories, water and wastewater sites, food plants and packaging lines. Its gateway collects tags from PLCs, stores their history and raises alarms when values go out of range. Operators watch it on Perspective and Vision screens all day. Maintenance teams rarely have a screen built for their questions, and digging through tag browsers or the alarm journal takes time a busy shift does not have.
With Agentic CMMS, Claude, ChatGPT and other AI agents can read your Ignition gateway. A technician asks what happened to a motor overnight, and the agent pulls the tag history and alarms that answer it. The operators' screens stay exactly as they are.
What your AI agent can do with Ignition
- Read the current value of any tag. "What is the level in Tank T-3, and is the inlet valve open?"
- Look at tag history. "How did the motor current on Mixer M2 behave between 22:00 and 06:00?" The agent reads the historian and calls out spikes and flat lines.
- Review the alarm journal. "Which alarms fired most often on the bottling line this week?" A good start for finding nuisance alarms.
- Trace an event. "Show me every alarm on Lift Station 4 in the hour before the pump tripped, in order."
- Browse by structure. "List the tags under the Boiler House folder that hold running hours." The agent follows your tag folders and UDTs.
- Count running hours. "How many hours did Compressor 2 run last month?" Handy for planning service by use instead of by the calendar.
- Check acknowledgement. "Which high-priority alarms are still unacknowledged?"
Ignition with your other systems
- Read running hours from Ignition and open a service work order in Fiix when a pump passes its interval.
- Compare repeat alarms on a conveyor with past work orders in Limble CMMS to see whether the last repair fixed the cause or only the symptom.
- Combine Ignition data from one site with AVEVA PI System data from another, so a regional manager gets one answer for both.
- Post a list of unacknowledged critical alarms to the maintenance channel in Microsoft Teams before shift handover.
Close to the control system, with care
Ignition sits next to live equipment, so the line between reading and writing matters more here than almost anywhere else. Read access answers most maintenance questions: values, history, alarms and running hours. Writing a setpoint is a different decision, and you make it per tool and per role.
Owners and admins choose which roles may use each Ignition tool, each person approves their own agent with their own login, and every tag read or write is kept in the tamper-evident activity log.